Harry’s Place, Mind the Curb and the Impatient Farmer

Morning broke in Hilperton more or less as the previous day ended – dreary and cool and wet.



The Lion and Fiddle Free House - Hilperton

We packed up the bags and rumbled downstairs to check out of the Lion and Fiddle. The owner was wiping down the bar; his wife was tidying up the lounge. We greeted the 60-ish gentleman, whose name we unfortunately never thought to ask, thanked him for a nice dinner and very nice accommodations (he apologized for the wedding noise and attendant commotion, but there was no need, it was nowhere near a bother for us). The guy had spent many years working and living in the States – Tennessee, among other places – in some capacity in the civil construction trade, and returned to Hilperton a few years ago to run this little free house.

I asked about that term. “Free house”.

A free house is a tavern that is unaffiliated with a particular brewery. In England, and the details of this I’m probably going to get a little wrong, most pubs (“public houses”) are essentially an extension of a single brewery – they serve only their beer product from the tap, or beers approved by the brewery owners - while a “free house” is typically owned by an individual who serves his patrons whatever he likes. I got the impression that a “free house” was a distinction of some merit, and that these things had their roots deep in English history and tradition. It also occurred to me that the great brewpub culture still expanding in the US is rendering the beer topography curiously like England’s, with local breweries opening their own restaurants and serving their own beer, to the exclusion of malt beverages brewed by craft beer competitors, or even the mega-breweries like Miller-Coors or Anheuser Busch. Try ordering a Bud Light in your average brewpub.

Anyway – it was a conversation piece I lofted as we were finishing up the paperwork, but the gentleman certainly didn't need any coaxing for conversation, reeling off stories of Hilperton, famous and long-dead English railroad engineers, driving in the States vs driving in England, the fickle fortunes of getting a share of the Bath tourist trade, etc etc, all with a heavy accent (I don’t know, was it a southern Midlands accent?) that at times left me nodding and “uh-huh’ing” in unconvincing befuddlement. 

I looked at my watch several times, feeling uncomfortable about impolitely cutting the guy off but mindful of a fairly ambitious day ahead of us. The place didn't get a lot of US tourists (“last ones were, oh, a month or so ago,” he half-remembered), and I guess chatting up some Yanks was a rare enough event for the proprietor to savor. 

We finally extracted ourselves from the bar, wrestled the luggage into the VW…and then of course, I had to find a loo (again) before we took off, so with some goodbye-hello-again awkwardness, I went back inside. The owner was gone, but his wife was puttering about, I asked her where the men’s room was and she pointed me down a hallway, and of course I couldn't find the magic door, so I went back up the hallway and apologized, and she re-pointed back the hallway with her free hand while vacuuming the lounge carpet, and I went down there again, spotted a door I would swear wasn't there 15 seconds earlier, and comforted my aging and prostate-cramped bladder. I hate long goodbyes.

Back on the road.

Lacock is a curious place. 

High Street, Lacock

Sharon in Lacock

So much of the village is unchanged since the fifteenth century that most of it is actually owned by the august National Trust, and it’s something of a second-tier tourist destination, owing in no small measure to its prominent role as a backdrop to one of the Harry Potter films. I will confess to never having seen any of the films, nor having read any of the books; I was drawn to the place by an intriguing (and probably fake) YouTube of a purported ghost filmed by a US tourist couple in the churchyard of the village’s ancient St Cyriac’s church a few years back, and figured, eh, while we’re in the neighborhood…

And it’s probably a mild disservice to refer to the place as a “second tier” tourist destination, as after we parked and walked toward the town, we strolled past at least 16 shiny tourist buses all lined up in specially designed parking spaces, their blue-haired and gawking patrons presumably wandering the streets. The buses were everywhere, at least on the outskirts of the village proper; 

Tour buses on High Street- Lacock

off the main drag, the streets were ridiculously narrow. 

Back street - Lacock

Back street - Lacock

Lacock, though, isn't really a museum. People actually live here – people with jobs and cars and kids in school and shopping needs and everything else – so the village exudes this weird, two-tiered kind of vibe; locals going on with their business, overlaid with a steady stream of camera-snapping tourists shooting pictures of their houses and streets and corner shops and front doors. 

Living in a tourist town probably isn’t as big a deal as all that – you can get used to anything – but maybe because of its small size, Lacock just seemed to highlight the dichotomy more to me than, say, York. It did occur to me that homeowners in Lacock are likely to feel strict constraints on them by the National Trust regarding building facades and property improvements that owners of historic properties in my own town (Boulder) must endure as well, so there’s probably a good deal more to actually living here than merely dodging the tourist buses. (But then again, if the village is “owned” by the National Trust, does that mean its residents are all renters?)

I stepped funny off a curb at one point, falling to a knee in the street, tearing my pants and scraping the skin on my kneecap. It actually hurt like hell; I spent about half my time in Lacock limping a little.

We strolled over to the municipal cemetery, a trim if unremarkable late Victorian memorial park. 

A sign indicated that the cemetery was maintained by local “offenders” through a program called Community Payback; we know this here as community service, commonly assigned to defendants guilty of misdemeanor criminal offenses... 

...although I'm unaware if community service troops stateside are commonly thanked for their work. 

The cemetery backs up to a sizable farm, and we heard the owner slapping and swearing at his animals unseen over the fence. An odd moment.  

Next was St Cyriac’s, first dedicated in the 11^th century but largely rebuilt in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries and the village’s medieval church. 

Inside, the Church was a somber affair, predictably elegant with its carved monuments and medieval trimmings, 

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

and the churchyard outside (no ghost, at least none we could see…) was smallish but satisfyingly old. Like many others, there were still-standing monuments in the yard itself as well old, orphaned monuments lined up against the stone wall. (We had seen this first a week and a half earlier, at St Luke’s in London.) And, there were actually other tourists browsing the churchyard.

St Cyriac churchyard

St Cyriac churchyard

St Cyriac churchyard

Back on the road, headed toward the ancient Avebury, but we had saved off another church on the GPS – St Anne’s, just outside the village of Bowden Hill – so we made a minor detour and headed over. Odd church, this one was. Clearly Victorian, with inexplicable and almost mysterious trimmings, the church sat on a gentle hillside overlooking the Wiltshire Plain and hosted a smallish, barely-century-old churchyard. 

The place had the faint scent of country-home wealth, a tidy place of worship for gentleman farmers. A nice lady was tending to one of the graves and greeted us with a smile…but the church itself was locked.

We shot the cemetery somewhat quickly, piled into the VW and headed off to Avebury.